ABSTRACT
Little is known about Marie de Romieu. Numbers of sources, eager, it would seem, to attach scandal to the name of a woman who wrote, tell us that she was a noblewoman, “in the circle of the Duke of Joyeuse,” and a favorite widely reO puted to be the lover of King Henry III.1 The same source also attributes to her pen the Instruction fo r Young Ladies, signed M.D.R. and more enticingly apO pearing in later editions as The M essenger o f Love or Instruction to Incite Young Ladies to Love (1573, 1597, and 1612). There is no evidence beyond the coincidence of initials to support any of this. Moreover, the promise of scandal offered by M essenger o f Love is belied by the recognition that the work is acO tually a translation of a work attributed to the Abbot Alessandro Piccolomini, urging young women to virtue.2 In the face of the paucity of reliable informaO tion, the other extreme of critical reaction has been to deny the existence of Marie’s poetic work or even of Marie herself, claiming it all was really proO duced by her brother, Jacques, who published a volume of M elanges (1584) under his own name which included poems from Marie’s Premieres Oeuvres [First Works], first published in 1581. However, even in the sixteenth century, there were those such as Guillaume Colletet who saw clearly that the Pre@ mieres Oeuvres were far superior to the “barbarous or at least rough and hard” style of her brother. If one discounts antifeminist prejudice or joy in scandal, there are no grounds to dispute the title-page attribution of her poems to Marie de Romieu herself. But who was Marie?
